“And we can’t rest for thinking about how he died,” Ida broke in. “We would never ever have dreamed that a man like Palmiro would have hanged himself.”
“That’s what they always say about suicides.”
“Yes, but you didn’t know the man! He was as much a ladies’ man as when he was in his twenties. Some people would swear that he and his daughter-in-law…”
“Shut up!” Sante tried to interrupt his wife. “What are you saying?”
Ida stopped, but her expression was of out-and-out malice, and this was the most telling of judgments.
“Who was it who asked you for the money, Palmiro or Paride?”
“Paride keeps well away. It was Palmiro who came. It was his job to do the rounds. He’d kept in touch from the days when he started up the dairy business.”
“What guarantees did he offer?”
Sante gave another shrug. “I told you. It’s all to do with trust. We wrote the transactions and the dates down in a notebook and he added his scribble and that was that.”
The commissario’s expression must have shown his concern, because he saw Sante bow his head. “You do know that a mark like that is not worth a thing?”
Sante nodded.
“How long has this been going on?”
“Many years now,” Ida said, accompanying the words with a wave of the hand which was meant to say that it was a long established practice.
“If it’s been going so well for all this time, what makes you so scared now?” the commissario said.
Sante’s expression lightened for a moment, but his dark mood returned as he started speaking. “As I’ve explained, because of Palmiro’s death. Nobody thought… and that son of his who’s never here
… the few times we’ve actually seen him he would speak in big words we couldn’t understand. He is used to discussions with bankers and financiers who handle money all day long. Many of them turned up at his villa and we were expected to bring them food we had made ourselves. We didn’t get on with them.”
“I can understand the question of trust, but to lend money blindly like that…”
Sante heaved a deep sigh and looked at his wife. It seemed that merely talking about it made him the more fearful of impending ruin.
“Palmiro had a way of convincing us. He repeated always the same thing. If we grow, you grow, the whole village grows. Who could quarrel with that? After the war, the poverty here was terrible. He made us feel like traitors if we refused him.”
“Tell him about the interest,” Ida hissed, without looking at her husband.
Sante sighed once more. “Well, he paid more than the banks.”
“Much more?”
“It depends. You had to bargain with him as though you were buying a batch of cheese. If you seemed to hesitate, he would increase the rate he was offering, then he would do the sums in his head and tell you how much you would gain after five, ten or fifteen years. It was hard to resist.”
“He was a right sly one in business,” Ida said, cutting the air with her hand.
“Did you ever see any returns?”
“If you insisted, Palmiro would settle up. It did happen a few times, but in the majority of cases, he wouldn’t let go. ‘If you give me the money for five years more, I’ll raise the rate by half a per cent,’ he would say. Then he would churn out numbers that made your head spin.”
“So you’re saying that no-one withdrew their money?”
“Virtually everyone round here can manage, so the money they gave him was money they were putting by for their children, or to keep themselves in comfort in old age, or just out of prudence. In this village, they’re great savers. They might live in hovels, but having some savings makes them feel more secure.”
Soneri could hear his own father talk of his fears for some “tomorrow” when anything might happen. The peasants always feared hailstones, or drought, or an outbreak of foot and mouth disease. “I’m sure Paride will do the right thing,” were the only words the commissario could find to reassure his hosts.
“Well, let us hope so,” Sante groaned, without conviction.
Soneri rose to go to bed, but Sante’s almost imploring look detained him a minute longer. “What can I do?” he said.
Sante murmured, “Nothing.”
4
Even before daybreak, the skies seemed to have shed their earlier heaviness. Soneri left the road between the houses, keeping Montelupo, still cloaked in a thick mist, directly ahead of him. He walked past the shuttered houses in Groppo and turned off to start his climb towards Croce, hoping to find some ceps in the more shaded areas which would be still damp with the dew falling from leafless trees. He came in sight of the chapel of the Madonna del Rosario, a place of pilgrimage in the month of May, and proceeded through the tangled vegetation which flourished in the clay of the lower valley and gave off the pungent scents of the wild. Before moving into the hornbeam woods, he stopped to get his breath. The last houses were now out of sight, and within the woods he felt himself both hunter and prey. When he looked up, he could make out wisps of mist clinging so closely to the peaks as to resemble smoke from a fire. Above the path, a sandstone balcony had crumbled under the pressure of the mountain streams and had slipped down into the valley, creating a deep scar in the woods.
If he had had sufficient strength in his legs, he would have already been at the mountain huts and perhaps even at the bar on Lake Santo which was not far from the peak, but first he wanted to reconnoitre the hillside and the watery gullies where the weak winter sun could not penetrate. He gripped the trunks of trees as he clambered down, trying to recall movements he had learned so many years earlier in outings with his father. The third time he fell, he saw them: a colony of “trumpets of death” seeming to intone a miserere in the shadow of an enormous oak.
Sante’s words rang in his ears, but he refused to be put off. His principal concern was finding someone able to cook those mushrooms the right way. He left them where they were when he heard the sound of something crashing about in the undergrowth close at hand, knocking into the lower branches of the trees. He decided it must be a wild boar, sniffing the air and detecting his presence. Soneri stood stock still, listening, and then, straight in front of him, he saw a strip of land which gave the appearance of having been ploughed. He swept aside the leaves and uncovered a second family of “trumpets of death”, crushed into tiny pieces by blows from a club. Evidently there was someone who did believe they were omens of ill fortune. Shortly afterwards, he heard the brushwood breaking as the boar made off. Once he was sure the beast was well away, he returned to the path, from which it was now impossible to see down into the valley.
A thick blanket of mist came down, turning the countryside grey. The huts could not be far off, but he was fearful of getting lost, and afraid too of those shots fired at some target, whatever that target was meant to be. At last he saw the outlines of the stone buildings, sheds for climbing equipment and summer dwellings in the mountaineering season when the passes echoed with the many languages used in that borderland between sea and plain. Inside one of them rubbish was scattered all around — empty cans, broken bottles, plastic bags and the remains of tinned food — but the ash in the fireplace and the crumpled bedclothes on the wooden bench were evidence of some recent presence.
When he stepped back outside, the mist had lifted and this made him resolve to carry on. It was eleven o’clock, so he would have time to reach Lake Santo, see if the bar was open and make his way back, even if this meant another day without a single cep being picked. He quickened his pace along the mule path, coming out into the pure air of the clearing with the bar, high up the mountainside, beyond the point where the wood gave way to moss and stone. It was cold, and it occurred to Soneri that the first snows of winter could not be far off. This thought and the sight of the remote bar made him think of his father with that lurching gait of his, as if he were pushing himself forward by putting pressure on one leg, a habit which spoke of experience gained over a lifetime of grim, debilitating hardship.
Even in the dying days of autumn, the bar was open. Baldi, the owner, was still behind the counter, not yet
